this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
150 points (95.2% liked)

Linux

48372 readers
1549 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi everyone!

I saw that NixOS is getting popularity recently. I really have no idea why and how this OS works. Can you guys help me understanding all of this ?

Thanks !

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The nice thing about nix and guix is that they're package managers, and so you get most of the benefits even if you're using a different OS.

I'm currently transitioning from Doom Emacs to my own config that's using guix. So far I've got a single manifest that contains all of the Emacs and Linux packages that are needed to run the config.

The guix part is really simple, but it allows me to reproduce my config on any Linux distro by cloning a repo and running a guix one liner. A different one liner can run it in a containerised environment. Also, I can roll back to any previous time I've updated something through that manifest, or pin a specific version of a package.

And that's just scratching the surface of what you can do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm using the Nix package manager for software that isn't in the repositories, on Void.